What to work on?

Update:

What to work on? What to learn and how to think about this question of spending majority of your time into something? I have been trying to figure out answers to questions as well, and it’s not straight-forward.

I feel our culture / written works around these questions, have a lot of different opinions, and mostly leave out the messy part - the empty dread of not knowing what comes next when you decide upon something. Currently, I have found the following couple of ideas that help convey what I have been thinking about:

Jason Benn with his excellent post:

Strategy 1: follow your curiosity, if you can: The main idea of Why Greatness Cannot be Planned is that it’s not effective to set goals when you’re venturing forth into unknown intellectual terrain. Instead, you should engage in novelty search. In practice, this means trusting that pursuing your curiosity for 12-18 months will lead you somewhere innovative.

Strategy #2: if you can’t, maximize usefulness None of that advice was useful to me at 22, because I, like the vast majority of people , had no obvious passions at that age. In fact, I found advice like the above to be actively unhelpful. It made my angst worse. I felt only jealousy at those that had discovered their passion early in life. This is why I’m eternally indebted to Cal Newport for So Good They Can’t Ignore You, which persuaded me that passion can come after mastery.

Marc Andreesen talks about something similar:

The first rule of career planning: Do not plan your career. The world is an incredibly complex place and everything is changing all the time. You can’t plan your career because you have no idea what’s going to happen in the future. You have no idea what industries you’ll enter, what companies you’ll work for, what roles you’ll have, where you’ll live, or what you will ultimately contribute to the world. You’ll change, industries will change, the world will change, and you can’t possibly predict any of it. Trying to plan your career is an exercise in futility that will only serve to frustrate you, and to blind you to the really significant opportunities that life will throw your way.

Career planning = career limiting. The sooner you come to grips with that, the better.

The second rule of career planning: Instead of planning your career, focus on developing skills and pursuing opportunities.

The entire post is worth reading here.